The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.
If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!
If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!
And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.
Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.
If you live in the European Union, I would ask, as a personal favour, that you consider signing this petition for a tax on great wealth. It is reasonable; it would have major impact if put into place; it is very feasible (no revision of the Treaties needed). It is the brainchild of French economist Thomas Piketty, a leading scholar of inequality. https://tax-the-rich.eu#economics#ClimateCrisis
Many folks have been taught about “The Tragedy of The Commons” in school. But what most folks don’t know is that it was complete bunk written by a white nationalist and eugenicist to justify colonization and genocide.
Commons can be successful. Many long-standing and successful commons exist. Many were studied by Nobel Prize-winning Political Scientist Elinor Ostram, who codified 8 principles for how commons can be governed sustainably and equitably in a community.
I’d really like for folks to stop using the term “tragedy of the commons” that assumes inevitable failure, and start calling them what they are. Commons with improper governance or “Failed commons”.
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
Regulators didn’t put microplastics in your water.
The nanny state didn’t lie to you about whether tobacco products caused cancer.
Socialism didn’t decide to take a third of your paycheck for health insurance coverage, and then still do everything in its power to deny your claims for lifesaving care.
Capitalists pursuing their self-interest did all of that, and more.
In April 1832, the Mexican government closed a loophole allowing settlers to reclassify their human chattel as indentured servants. This finally outlawed slavery, full stop.
For Stephen Austin, this was the last straw. “Texas must be a slave country,” he wrote a friend, “circumstances and unavoidable necessity compels it.”
No way! A European Citizens' Initiative to (1) tax millionaires to (2) finance a Green New Deal via EU Commission own funds, and (3) whose proponents are (check notes) the president of the Belgian Socialist Party, a Polish former Employment and Social Inclusion Commissioner and Thomas Piketty (@pikettylemonde), possibly the world's most prominent scholar of inequality.
Humble request: do you know of any real life experience of post-capitalist economies, even partial ones? Local currencies? Cooperative models? Community land trusts? Priority given to resilience over efficiency? #solarpunk economies? There are a few usual suspects (Mondragon, Cooperativa Integral Catalana, Transition Network...), but I struggle to find long lists of cases. Boost appreciated @g_kallis@jks@jasonhickel#postcapitalism#economics#degrowth#postgrowth
We really need to rethink our capitalistic obsession of running things like a business. Cutting costs to increase profits obviously doesn't make sense in areas of education, healthcare, public utilities, and prisons, to name just a few.
Hell, Boeing is making a strong case that it doesn't even make sense for businesses to be run like a business, much less these public goods...
The US Department of the Treasury just released a comprehensive new report about labor relations and the middle class that affirms what the workers have been screaming out for at least 150 years no…
We are entering into "the great wealth transfer" where about $5.2 trillion (that's the one with more zeros than I can count) is about to pass from the, largely undeserving, super rich to their entirely undeserving heirs.
"Research by Forbes magazine found there were 15 billionaires aged 30 or under but that none had created their own wealth, instead benefitting from huge inheritances."
Wow. Jag Bhalla offers one of the most sensible, thought-provoking, and wholly convincing articles I have ever read.
Title: "Climate Optimism Is Dangerous and Irrational"
Subtitle: "Overly-confident math models based on unrealistic assumptions are used to avoid crisis-consistent climate policies and to protect global elite privilege, while abandoning our duties to the planet’s most vulnerable."
It includes these section headings:
‣ The IPCC’s Official Modeling Malarkey
‣ The Worst Offenders: The Economists
I hope you can take the time to read the entire article. It's very long, extremely well-researched, and completely devastating.
This is near the conclusion...
Climate change is not just going to be “apocalyptic,” it’s already apocalyptic.
It’s just that the apocalypse is not something that happens to the entire world at once. Instead, the apocalyptic events are experienced mostly by the world’s poorest people (who, incidentally, have contributed the least to creating the problem). Who, witnessing the scale of flooding in Pakistan last year, could possibly say that the climate crisis is not “apocalyptic,” unless you regard Pakistanis as unpeople whose well-being simply doesn’t factor into the equation? 33 million people were displaced, and millions of homes destroyed.
When white Western elites publish books with titles like "It’s Not The End of The World" or "Apocalypse Never" or "False Alarm", what they mean is “it’s not the end of the world for people like me,” “apocalyptic conditions will never be experienced by my sector of society,” and “those of us who are among the world’s richest do not need to be alarmed.”
Of course, even these are false comforts — the mansions of Malibu are flammable, after all.
Prevention is (almost always) cheaper than treatment, and homelessness does not break this rule.
Economists recently used a randomized control trial to estimate the effectiveness of giving households on the brink of homelessness cash to prevent it, $2000 on average.
The results of this temporary assistance were a 73% reduction in the risk of homelessness after one year and that each dollar spent generated $2.47 in benefits to the community.
Claudia Goldin just won the Nobel Prize in #Economics. She’s best known for her work on how “Greedy #Work” limits equity and the advancement of women in the workplace.
“Goldin argues for systemic workplace reforms rather than the hearts-and-minds type of change so often advocated by girlbosses, self-help writers, and corporate feminists. Goldin, refreshingly, rejects any Lean In–type advice as ‘quick-fix notions’ utterly unable to address the fact that our ‘work and care systems are relics of a past when only men had careers and families.’ Greedy work, to be blunt, assumes that the worker has a wife at home. It therefore forces one-half of many couples to, if not stay home full-time, then prioritize the domestic front, choosing less well-paid jobs that offer greater structure and flexibility so their partners can work whatever hours their bosses demand.”
This graphic (circulated by Bridget Doran on LinkedIn) neatly sums up the problem with the simple message that growth needs to be prioritised & measured via a nominal GDP measure.
In this sense it reflects a heckle reported by Anand Menon nearly a decade ago, during a lecture on GDP & the problems of growth:
'That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours'!
The simple truth that growth is unevenly distributed is often lost in policy discussions!
Ready for news that will shock nobody? It turns out globalization mostly helps out the richest 10% and has little to no impact on the poorest.
"The influence of globalization on income inequalities worldwide was greater than we had expected. We were particularly surprised that these differences were mainly due to the gains of the richest and that the lower income groups benefited little or not at all."
This is the first thing I’ve seen from a major press outlet that even resembles a stick in the eye of conventional economic wisdom. And it is absolutely on point.
We must scream at the top of lungs, and shame any who dare, try to defend the conventional orthodox economic machine that is tearing our children’s future down around their ears. #FUCKNORDHAUS!!!
Please, I beg you, circulate this article as far and wide as you can.
New US Treasury report confirms that unions are good for everybody (boingboing.net)
The US Department of the Treasury just released a comprehensive new report about labor relations and the middle class that affirms what the workers have been screaming out for at least 150 years no…